We asked a psychologist why games about cleaning can be so compelling.
I recently spent an hour clicking on pictures of rocks and logs to make them disappear. I was cleaning up my farm in Stardew Valley, but that friendly little narrative aside, I wasjust clicking on things to delete them. And I was happy to do it. Toiling in the fields with my click-axe, pulverizing rocks, cutting down trees, and slicing up weeds is weirdly pleasant in the mindless way picking pills off a sweater can be. I wondered why, so I asked a psychologist.
Madigan also pointed out that studies—including Zeigarnik’s—have shown that we remember more about tasks which have been interrupted than those we’ve completed, presumably because we need to recall where we left off if we’re to return to the project. And that sense of ‘incompleteness’ weighs on us.Zeigarnik found that participants who were interrupted in the middle of a task could be very unhappy about it. It’s easy to empathize.
I surmise from all this that one of the reasons I clean is simply to get the clutter off my mind. To complete a task like tidying my farm, or some sub-goal in that effort, is to allow myself to forget about it—a relief even if the task itself is simple and repetitive. But maybe all the life hackers are onto something. Article after article says that clutter increases stress, and though I've had trouble finding a lot of hard evidence, it is accepted that we, making it hard to toss even trivial things.A game, however, can lay that disarray into a grid—some squares pristine, others clearly marked as unsightly junk —and all you have to do to restore order is click.
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